Human landmarks in spatial expressions: from Latin to Romance

The paper discusses the coding of location and direction with respect to human entities, and anlayzes the change undergone by the Latin coding system with its outcomes in the Romance languages. Latin features different coding strategies depending on whether location and direction relate to the interior of a landmark or to ints vicinity; the former were used with inanimate landmarks, while the latter could be used with both inanimate and animate (human) ones. Most Romance languages do not continue this opposition. As a consequence, coding strategies for space expressions with human landmarks across the Romance languages display different patterns, which are described and discussed in the paper.